One of the favorite gifts I found for my daughters this past Christmas was a sunlight print kit at a wonderful local bookstore, The Toadstool Bookshop. I’ve been hoping to do this project with them for quite awhile now and given their ages, 6 and almost 4, I was sure it would hold their interest. The day before we were all headed back to school and work, it was mostly sunny, so we decided it was a good day to tackle the project. I was worried about finding natural objects to work with, but even in winter, there was plenty to choose from.

I happened upon a live fern on one of my walks so that became my object of choice. We also gathered other things outside our home for the girls to choose from: dried flowers, small lilac twigs, leaves and grasses. Ella has been collecting feathers for some time now so her choice was easy. Lucy’s first try involved some tiny flowers that unfortunately, didn’t end up working well. I think if we had pressed the flowers in a book it would have worked fine, but they weren’t quite flat enough to create a strong impression on the paper so we ended up doing a second one with a couple of oak leaves. This is an incredibly simple process and the results are almost immediate so for those with short attention spans, a perfect activity.

Sunlight paper with fern just placed in sunlight.

To start, we pulled individual sheets of paper from the protective black envelope, then placed our objects of choice on the sunlight paper and covered the paper with the clear plastic top that came with the kit to hold the object in place. We placed the paper in direct sunlight and waited until the bluish paper turned a whitish hue.

The blue paper turns whitish when exposed long enough to the sun.

The sun wasn’t cooperating with us that day and kept disappearing behind passing clouds so the usual 30 seconds turned into 15 minutes, but in the end, it worked just as well. When we removed Ella’s feather, the impression left by the object looked blue.

After exposure to the sun, the impression left by the object (in this case a feather) is blue.

We then took the paper, submerged and agitated it completely in water with a few drops of citric acid (we had limes on hand so a few drops of those worked just fine).

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